Queensland Health computer system crashes forcing medicos to find paper patient records

A widespread computer system outage at 24 of Queensland’s largest hospitals that impacted emergency departments and outpatient appointments has finally ended, after more than eight hours.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane uses the ieMR system.

A widespread system outage across Queensland’s largest hospitals which lasted hours, caused appointments to be cancelled, and threw staff into paper-based disarray will be investigated to prevent a repeat of the issue.

Queensland’s health disaster centre was put on high alert on Wednesday after the “integrated electronic medical record” or ieMR system crashed for 8.5 hours. Queensland Health noted it would continue to “monitor the situation closely”.

Clinicians were understood to be frustrated with the need to revert to old school paper-based methods, while a health worker at one of the 24 impacted sites — which included emergency departments attached to those hospitals — described the situation as an “absolute nightmare”.

The ieMR system, which pulls together different core programs into one platform, started experiencing log on issues from about 8am on Wednesday and was back up about 4.30pm, in an unexpected turnaround after earlier expectations the root cause of the mysterious may not have been known for days.

ieMR, progressively rolled out to hospitals since 2014, exists to replace paper-based clinical charts and gives staff the ability to access real time patient information and log important observations like their vital signs.

The record system is used at the Queensland Children’s Hospital, South Brisbane. Picture: Supplied

It is understood to be the longest consecutive outage of the ieMR system in recent years, with a patch in November 2022 causing short spurts of downtime over two days. The main vendor of ieMR is Oracle Health, who were contacted for comment.

The Princess Alexandra Hospital, QEII, and Townsville Hospital were among the 15 most impacted, with five others including Cairns, Royal Brisbane and Women’s, and Caboolture hit at a lesser level as their use of ieMR was still intermediate or basic. The four satellite hospitals were impacted.

Townsville University Hospital is impacted by the system crash.

Queensland Health eHealth clinical director Dr Andrew Blanch said there was no indication the issue had been sparked by a cyberattack. Unlike the 2022 disruption there were no patches to the ieMR in the last six days.

“I want to confirm that there have been no impacts related to patient safety,” he said.

But Dr Blanch confirmed processing through the emergency department would likely be affected, and there were instances of outpatient appointments being cancelled.

He said clinicians had expressed frustration as they preferred using the digital system, though staff were well trained in the fall back option to prepare for these instances.

A health worker impacted said the incident had been an “absolute nightmare”, with newer nurses who have never known a life without ieMR most disadvantaged.

A text message sent to staff of Princess Alexandra Hospital from administrators. Picture: Supplied

One impacted parent said their daughter’s pediatrician were unable to provide the follow up needed as they had no line of sight on information from the previous visit.

The Queensland Ambulance Service indicated offload times did not appear to be impacted by the outage.

Queensland Health confirmed a post-incident review analysis to understand the cause of the issue and how to prevent it happening in the future will take place over coming days.

It’s the latest in a list of bungles linked to the rollout of the $1.2bn ieMR program, which was first planned to be fully implemented by March 2021.

In June 2014 the state government put the ieMR at the heart of its eHealth strategy to digitise public hospitals.

A draft 2018 business case forecast 27 hospitals would have the system implemented by March 2021. Troubled software prompted the system to be delayed in 2019.